The celebrations that marked the tenth anniversary of Java
technology have wrapped up, but the successes of the Java Community
Process (JCP) Program and the Executive Committees (EC) that guide
it keeps on coming. In interviews conducted shortly after the JCP EC
elections of December 2005 the newly elected and ratified members of the
Micro Edition (ME) and Standard/Enterprise Edition (SE/EE) ECs shared
their thoughts about Java technology's evolution and its future. They
are unanimous in their belief that the technology has come a long way
and the combination of teamwork and hard work will continue to make
its future bright. Check out their views.

Micro Edition (Java ME) Executive Committee – Ratified Members

IBM, David Girle

IBM, as the world’s largest information technology company, has been a
substantial contributor to the Java Community for a decade. IBM is
represented in Java ME by David Girle, a senior software developer who
has been involved in various Java technology projects since 1998,
including most recently the development lead for SyncML4J, a
synchronization framework written in the Java language. "IBM is heavily
investing in the success of Java technology - In the Java ME space, IBM
provides VM ports to more than 20 environments, together with support
for a broad range of configuration, profiles and JSRs" Girle says. He
says IBM’s representatives, whether leading or participating in Expert
Groups and Executive Committees, will continue to use their expertise
and technical resources to make contributions for the betterment of the
Java Community and to help guide the Java platforms’ evolution and
development.

Nokia, Pentti Savolainen

Nokia is represented by Pentti Savolainen, who brings a record of
experience in software R&D, sales and corporate collaborations. Nokia
has been an active member of the ME EC since its establishment. "Our
goal is to develop the JCP program toward more open standards organization while
maintaining its effectiveness, and increasing Java technology
competitiveness and acceptability," said Savolainen, who heads the Nokia
team that has responsibilities for terminal Java API related
standardization, industry cooperation and preparation of JCP standards
for implementation into Nokia terminals. He said Nokia expects to
continue aiding the JCP program effort by promoting such goals.

In addition to
the EC work, Nokia is also a very strong contributor in the practical
Java Specification Request (JSR) Expert Groups (EG), currently leading 17 Java ME related JSRs adding
new functionality to Java technology, Savolainen noted. Even if Java
technology has gained some significant wins in some areas, such as
downloadable games for Java enabled mobile terminals - Java and the JCP
faces many challenges to stay competitive, he said. Those challenges
include reducing fragmentation of the technology, a need for speed and
innovation, and better architectural solutions, to mention some,
Savolainen says. "To speed Java technology development and innovation
the JCP needs to open up and find ways to better enable quick endorsement of
development from outside JCP as well," he says. Java ME technology also
needs new architectures to address future challenges and allowing for
creation of wider selection of different applications and compelling
services by the developers and the industry.

Royal Philips Electronics, Jon Piesing

Philips became interested in the JCP program as Java technology was
built into a number of its products and became a JCP program member in 2000.

Royal Philips Electronics is now one of the world's biggest electronics
companies and Europe's largest. Jon Piesing's breadth of understanding of Java
technology issues -- technical, business, and licensing -- in general
and of Philips' products in particular make him an ideal representative.

Piesing
says the most important issues facing the JCP program are structural
rather than technical. He says the process is too "bottom-up," and needs
more structure. "One significant issue is the excessive cumulative cost
of TCKs for all the individual JSRs," he says. "While it would be very
helpful for the executive committee to address this, it seems costs are
hard to discuss while remaining within the limits of what is allowed by
anti-trust law."

An issue that might be easier to address is providing
greater transparency into the progress and schedules of expert groups,
he says. This would help those whose main interest is the (future)
existence of a JSR for a particular feature rather than the details of
its contents, Piesing says. In the future he said he expects the process
will become more transparent to non-members of expert groups. He said
that the most likely technology advance in Java ME is the ability to
reliably run multiple applications/MIDLets/Xlets at the same time
including killing one of them without interrupting the others. "This
won't directly
help application developers but it would be a positive improvement to
the end-user experience," Piesing said.

Java ME Executive Committees – Elected Members

Symbian, Stuart John

Symbian has a long history of active participation in the JCP program and JSR
specification development for the mobile Java standards and their
implementation into smartphones. We spoke with Stuart John who at the
time of the interview was Symbian's representative on the ME EC. Stuart
notes that ten years ago his team "was flat out at work on the genesis
of what would eventually be known as v1 of Symbian OS: a 32-bit
operating system targeted at PDAs and advanced mobile phones." It didn't
take long for news of Java to take hold, and he adds that collaborative
work with Sun began in 1997. "Since then, more than 50 million Symbian
OS mobile phones have shipped containing Java technology”, he specifies.

John says participation in specification development provides early
visibility of the building blocks for future applications and helps
reduce fragmentation in the existing platform. He says that the most
pressing high-level matter facing the mobile IT industry may be dealing
with complexity. "To appeal to mainstream end users, the devices have to
hide all this complexity, providing a veneer of simplicity that appears
to anticipate users' needs," John says. "Get the design wrong, and the
complexity spills out, confusing and frustrating users." To keep a lid
on the demons of complexity, the mobile IT industry needs to keep in
mind the injunction to "cooperate before competing." John says there is
little point in companies gaining a few additional percentiles in what
is still a relatively small market - it's far better to grow this market
to its greater potential.

Over the next few years, smart mobile devices
will dramatically increase their value for entertainment, education, and
enterprise purposes alike, he says. "They'll help their users to keep in
touch with the conversation, issues, and information that's important to
them," John says. "They'll integrate more and more of the functionality
that presently requires many separate objects." Each such integration
provides the possibilities for new "killer applications" in the
intersection of functionality that used to be separate, he says. These
devices will build on the power of the mobile phone phenomenon to
provide "always on" social computers. "Java APIs to this new
functionality will be crucial to allowing novel services to appear in
quick response to newly identified user needs," John said.

Sony Ericsson, Hanz Hager

Sony Ericsson has taken an active role in the ME Executive Committee and
has been working to ensure an open, well-managed community since joining
the EC in 2002. Sony's representative, Hanz Hager, is the Java Product
Manager in charge of product strategy, planning, requirements, and
execution, and he oversees all inbound licensing of Java technology for
Sony Ericsson. He's been involved in all projects that embed Java
technology into Sony Ericsson handsets. He marvels at how, from its
modest beginnings, "the J2ME marketplace is becoming the largest
installed base of developer platforms with almost 1 billion units."

One of the most important issues facing the executive committee is
fragmentation in the wireless industry, Hager says. "It has been
discussed a lot lately," Hager says. "Everyone has their view of how
fragmented it is and what the problems are. In my view the Java
ecosystem for mobile devices is not very fragmented any more, but we are
starting to see a new type of fragmentation when different carriers
start setting different rules for their markets." This will make it hard
to work globally for small players and this will most likely kill some
of those efforts, he warns.

Looking to the future, Hager says it is very
clear that there is a desire to have a more flexible Java technolgoy stack in
mobile devices. "CLDC has been found a bit to restrictive for that," he
says. "Therefore we will see bigger and bigger importance of CDC based
solutions."More and more systems will also have the capability to
execute multiple applications simultaneously, Hager says, and backwards
compatibility with MIDP/CLDC will continue to be important.